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A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE ISSUE 57 CATASTROPHE c US $12 CANADA $12 UK £7 CABINET        55 THE HOLY FIRE AND THE LONELY SAINT Matthew Spellberg

What the modern world calls ergotism was known in Europe for a thousand years by many names, identi- cal in their ferocity but varied in their symbolism, like the banners of a barbarian army. Ignis sacer, read one heraldic device, the holy fire. Ignis gehennae, read another, the fire of Gehenna, the fire of hell. Le mal des ardents, the sickness of the ardent, of the burning ones. St. Martial’s fire, after the saint whose relics dispatched the miracle des ardents of 994 ce in the Limousin. And eventually, above all, St. Anthony’s fire, named for the saint who could heal it and also induce it. Nemo impune peccat in Antonium, read the inscription above the main portal of the abbey that housed his relics—no one sins against Anthony with impunity. Nemo invanum currit ad Antonium, read the second line. No one runs to Anthony in vain. Ergotism takes its modern name from , the hard, dormant stage, known scientifically as the , in the lifecycle of the Claviceps Ear of infected with ergot fungus. Illustration purpurea. It manifests as a conical structure colored from Adam Neale, Researches Respecting purple, gray, or black, and it grows parasitically the Natural History, Chemical Analysis, and among the grains of certain , especially rye. Medicinal Virtues, of the Spur, or Ergot of Rye, The livid prisms, called ergot because they look like When Administered as a Remedy in Certain argot, a cock’s spur in Old French, flourish when States of the Uterus, 1828. Courtesy Edinburgh a cold winter is followed by a wet spring, periods University Library. when in primitive agricultural societies harvests are poor, and farmers can’t afford to discard blemished A person who eats ergotic bread first suffers crops. Ergot contains a number of potent , symptoms of an indistinct illness: a fever and an including lysergic acid, the key ingredient of lsd. itching over his body. He may begin to feel an inter- Midwives have for centuries known that it can be mittent burning sensation in his limbs. He may used to induce uterine contractions. plunge them into cold water for relief, and he may not It was not widely known until the seventeenth think himself anything more than fatigued by hard century, however, that when baked into bread and work or, if he’s a pilgrim on the way to Santiago de consumed in sufficient quantities, the ergot of rye Compostela, by the long walk across southern France is the cause of St. Anthony’s fire, a terrible series of in the summer. The first distinctive sign of the ardent symptoms leading to permanent injury and, fre- sickness, however, comes next. The itching becomes quently, death. Modern outbreaks have shown that something subtler and more terrible, a light epidermal ergot-infected flour is slightly discolored and some- pattering, the feeling of ants crawling over the skin. what oily in texture, but it gives off no distinct odor, At this point the illness reaches a juncture, devel- and in medieval Europe it probably seemed well oping along two different paths. The first route sees within the wide boundaries of the edible, bound- the extremities turn pink, then yellow, and finally, aries delineated not so much by ignorance as by a as the skin peels off, black. There is acute ischemia— self-reproducing cycle of famine and warfare.1 In the reduction of blood flow—and motion becomes years with a high yield of ergot, tens of thousands hard and painful. Sores begin to appear across the were affected. body, and the stomach swells. Lactating mothers 56 MATTHEW SPELLBERG lose their milk, and pregnant women abort. There is Yet some circumstantial evidence suggests that a burning pain, and eventually sets in. The for a thousand years in Europe, St. Anthony’s fire limbs—sometimes one, sometimes several—shrivel caused and mental terrors in sufferers away, seem to char, and die. Sometimes they fall off both convulsive and gangrenous. For example, many on their own, sometimes they must be amputated. If artistic depictions of the disease by famous painters the gangrenous limbs are removed completely, there such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald is a chance of recovery. If they linger, death is almost (the latter’s painting commissioned for a hospital certain. dedicated to treating ignis sacer) show someone with The second path the disease takes is more insidi- gangrenous physical symptoms who is surrounded, ous. It engenders involuntary of the fingers and in many cases totally upstaged, by a host of and wrists, and soon of the whole body chimeras, by demons and angels pivoting between similar to epileptic seizures. Eventually the effects terror and ecstasy. There is also a striking closeness to become as grotesque as they are painful, for the metaphor in the otherwise literal descriptions of the episodes can cause the body to collapse in on itself, French chronicles. It is written, over and over again, and the patient contorts into a packed ball of limbs that the gangrenous disease arises from a fire that no or a displaced gnarl of branches, resembling less a water can quench and that no one can see, burning human than a human hacked into pieces and rebuilt limbs from the inside out until they are black as coal. with every appendage out of place. The chronicles suggest that people believed, and felt, Both forms, the gangrenous and the convul- and knew, that actual flames were burning in their sive, were well described in the Middle Ages, and stomachs and arms. This is borne out by the common it was clearly understood that they were the same depiction of St. Anthony stamping out a fire with disease. The gangrenous tended to be more com- his feet, and the fact that the walls of hospitals for mon in France, while the convulsive appeared more ardents were painted all around with red flames. frequently east of the Rhine, a situation that physi- This may seem a minor contention, but it has cian Mervyn Eadie of the University of Queensland certain important implications. Something may have thinks might have been due to the effect of different occurred during outbreaks of St. Anthony’s fire that, soils on the exact chemical composition of ergot.2 were it to happen today, we would call a hallucina- There is, however, one possible, and perhaps tion, but because it happened long ago, we don’t. important, difference between the modern clinical The history of St. Anthony’s fire may therefore pose description of ergotism and the medieval clini- a question about the difference between a halluci- cal description of St. Anthony’s fire. According to nation and a metaphor, a question that might have modern medical literature, mental disturbances, something to say about the effect of Christianity on including confusion, dementia, and vivid hallucina- the modern West, and on the role of culture in shap- tions (effects of the lysergic acid), occur only in the ing consciousness. convulsive variety. But the evidence for this is not Some further background is needed before we definitive, as most of the cases of ergotism studied confront this boundary between the literal and by science have been non-hallucinating gangre- the figurative. St. Anthony’s fire is one of the most nous ones resulting from the excessive intake of feared diseases in medieval Europe; it comes from ergot-based drugs, now used to treat migraines. nowhere and inflicts long-lasting horrors on its vic- drugs have not been known to cause the tims. They burn and blacken; they see demons; they convulsive variety, and although doctors saw hallu- convulse and seize; they jump from windows (as is cinations paired with convulsions in the nineteenth also common during psychotic episodes triggered and early twentieth centuries, ethical considerations by consuming lsd). Medieval medicine is essentially make a modern study of this almost eradicated con- helpless against it, though not for lack of trying. In dition impossible. The most we can say for certain is fact, it is this disease that gives medieval medicine that modern victims of gangrenous ergotism do not its distinctive character, that will impel it to make suffer hallucinations, and that victims of convulsive a major contribution to the history of healing. St. ergotism used to suffer them often. Anthony’s fire—not the plague, not smallpox, not 57 THE HOLY FIRE AND THE LONELY SAINT syphilis—is the catalyst for the first pan-European Roman Curia, and they are the only order accorded network of hospitals, organized with a discipline this privilege until 1300. unequaled in the West for many centuries. The hospitals in the town of Saint-Antoine are At the close of the eleventh century, the holy fire a wonder. During times of epidemic, they house breaks out in the Dauphiné, an ancient county of as many as two thousand patients. (On the other the Holy Roman Empire in present-day southeast- hand, in 1589, when a season of bubonic plague and ern France. According to later sources, a nobleman religious war disrupts travel throughout France, named Gaston de La Valloire takes his son, afflicted only seven ardents remain in the abbey.) Everything with the disease, to pray at the relics of St. Anthony is strictly and efficiently ordered. Upon entering, the Great, prince of hermits. Anthony’s bones had patients are carefully examined to make certain been brought to the Dauphiné thirty years before they actually suffer from St. Anthony’s fire. Those by a Frankish knight named Jocelin, who received who have another disease are put in separate wards them from the Byzantine emperor Romanos iv and sometimes even sent away.4 The true ardents, Diogenes in thanks for his military service against meanwhile, are ushered into a world of incredible the Saracens. The bones are said to have trans- spiritual and social strictness. They must pledge to lated miraculously from the Egyptian desert to be loyal to the faith and the order while in its care. Alexandria and subsequently to Constantinople, They must live morally and chastely while in the where they rested in the Hagia Sophia before their hospital. If a male and female patient wish to be departure for France. Gaston promises that if his son married, it can only be with explicit permission of Gérin is healed, he will devote himself, in the name the order. One of their number must serve as night of St. Anthony, to the care of the ardents. watchman. If they are able, they must pray the Whatever the true outcome of this story or its canonical hours in the church, observing the matins relation to reality, a group of noblemen forms a lay and lauds and nones and vespers with the monks. brotherhood named for St. Anthony in the last decade Those who can’t are taken care of by the pragmatic of the eleventh century. They build a hospital for holy hospital architecture, which consists of a huge rect- fire in the town of Saint-Antoine-en-Viennois, where angular room with a rounded chapel at the end. The the relics are kept in the care of a Benedictine priory. doors of the chapel can swing wide open, and sud- True to its etymology, the hospital is also a hostel for denly the whole space with its hundreds of crowded pilgrims coming to pray to St. Anthony, or continu- beds (sometimes three or four amputees share a mat- ing on to Santiago.3 The brotherhood and its patron tress) is an ark for prayer. flourish. Anthony will join Roch and Sebastian as The order makes promises in return. First and one of the great protectors against illness in the foremost, the sick are fed every day, and given meat Catholic pantheon. The lay organization will become three times a week. On holidays, they get a small by papal bull a monastic order using the Rule of St. donation and a feast. At Easter, to each a lamb. At Augustine, fitting because the story of Anthony’s Christmas, white bread the size of four rolls and a life had profoundly affected Augustine on the eve full pitcher of undiluted wine, beef, pork, and a cup of his conversion to Christianity. The Antonites will of wine with honey.5 Although the cause of ergotism eventually unseat the Benedictines in Saint-Antoine is unknown, the order somehow senses that fresh and take control of the relics; in the little town they and healthy food is essential to recovery, perhaps build their mother abbey. They build commanderies the intuition of a society that knows intimately the and adjoining hospitals along the pilgrim routes, in many insidious effects of hunger. But possibly more Freiburg, Isenheim, Memmingen, Basel, Cologne, than that, since the provision of food is also bound Paris, Avignon, Montpellier, Carcassonne, Toulouse, to the structures and symbols of the liturgical cal- Turin, Rome, Naples, Castrojeriz, and León. At the endar. This is most clear when it comes to the main order’s height in the fourteenth century, there will be instruments of healing, which are, first, the saint 369 such satellites in Europe, including in England vinage, wine mixed with herbs that has been poured and Hungary. In 1253, the Antonites are mentioned over Anthony’s bones, and second, Anthony’s bal- in papal documents as the official nurses to the sam, a closely guarded secret mixture of herbs German woodcut by unknown artist depicting St. Anthony, ca. 1440–1450. The saint, shown with his various symbols, is surrounded by victims of the holy fire. Courtesy Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. 59 THE HOLY FIRE AND THE LONELY SAINT

(maybe the same as in the saint vinage) rubbed on the from an illustrated edition of Balzac’s Les petites extremities to soothe the burning.6 The main medi- misères de la vie conjugale started to dance across his cines—bread, wine, oil—are respectful parodies of bed, becoming ever more daring and capricious. the Eucharist and the chrism, modeled on the central St. Anthony’s fire, we know, can cause vivid spiritual performance of Christianity. Eating and hallucinations. A probable outbreak of convulsive drinking—essential to healing, and maybe the main ergotism in southern France in the 1950s (prob- reason for the order’s successes—are a by-product of able because there are some who allege it was the Antonites’ love of symbolic order, for the lamb at ) afflicted hundreds of villag- Easter is foremost the Lamb of God, and only second ers with visions of snakes, soldiers, and heavenly a lamb to eat. lights ordering them to leap from windows.7 And Giorgio Agamben has written eloquently of although gangrenous ergotism does not generally what was variously called in European monasticism produce hallucinations of this sort, it seems reason- the regula vitae, the rule of life; the regula et vita, the able, even obvious, that even for gangrenous patients rule and life; and the regula vel vita, the rule or life. in the medieval period, facing a disease they did He argues in his book The Highest Poverty that the not understand and could not effectively cure, interchangeability of these formulations (the rule of their overwhelming physical pain would have been life is also rule and life) indicates that the governing augmented by a mercenary parade of psychic fears of monastic life and the living of monastic life were capitalizing on each and every consequence of the thought by the monks to be completely coincident. disease—the body’s betrayal, the mind’s impotence, The hours and rituals of the monastery did not com- the approach of death. It is entirely conceivable that pel behavior; behavior did not govern the hours and the manifestations of this fear took on the weight of rituals. Rather, behavior and rules were meant to physical reality, and began to resemble what we in replicate each other exactly and organically, with- the modern world would call .8 For the out any punishment or direct exercise of authority afflicted would have tried desperately to describe in needed to make them cohere. Agamben considers whatever vocabulary was available to them—that this an unprecedented and unique form of non- of fire, or demons, or curses, or just retribution for authoritarian political organization. sins—what it was that was happening to their bod- The Antonites used something akin to this coin- ies. My own experience with the harrowing effects of cidence of rule and life as a template for healing. The hypochondria, especially hypochondria manifested sick needed continuous structure, communal protec- on top of actual illness, leaves me in no doubt of the tions, and, above all, a common set of symbols, like many avenues that a fire-addled mind might take, compass points indicating the way to health, in order into self-pity or terror, toward delusion and paranoia. to live. But this armature for living had to be actively The Antonites, helpless against most of the embraced, not passively accepted, an axiom made physical effects, could at least discipline the spiritual explicit by the fact that the patients had to serve as ones. The shifting fears of illness were straitjacketed their own watchmen and swear oaths of fealty, like in a series of ritualized, symbolic actions, actions temporary monks. An important effect of order is to borrowed from religious practice and made into a invest the mutability of human experience, governed kind of therapy, an elaborate and theatrical placebo, by the whim of subjective time, with a symbolic fix- healing by mimesis, by performance. For those ity. The wretchedness of illness rejects structure; it who survived, the performance ended in a decisive erases habit and makes time impossible to measure. valediction to illness, maybe intended to prevent lin- Hours stretch into days, a week can seem to pass in a gering psychic trauma: the healed victims hung their night. Even a minor fever without the disruptions of blackened limbs in the abbey church as ex-votos lysergic acid can cause confusion, , dreams to St. Anthony. In Lourdes or Santiago, the healed more vivid than reality. Aby Warburg, who went on now leave little brass models of their legs or arms, to devote his life to studying the aliveness of images, or perhaps a crutch they once used, but in Antonite remembered that during a bout of typhoid fever at churches, it was the leg itself, the very limb, that the age of six, in 1873, the little devils and carriages was left behind, turned from a leg into the symbol 60 MATTHEW SPELLBERG of a leg. What looks from afar to be a gruesome and virtus, the foundational classical notions that a practice is up close, by its own logic, a sanitizing act, person is constituted by the duties and privileges that the transformation of the unpredictable vagaries of accrue to him within his society. But the revolution is bodily sensation into clean and ordered signs. still more radical, for Anthony is not merely a person The planet around which all the symbols of heal- who turns his back on the community; he is a person ing orbit is Anthony himself. By the late Middle Ages, constitutionally incapable of accepting community, at he is rich in iconography. He has the flames at his feet, least as it exists in his own time. a bell, a book, a pig, blackened hands and arms hang- A powerful detail in Athanasius, so distinc- ing above, and on his habit and his staff the order’s tive that even after sixteen hundred years it retains insignia, the Greek letter tau, which appropriately an aura of authenticity, is that as a boy Anthony resembles a crutch.9 But why exactly is the prince of does not like to play, neither alone nor with other hermits the patron of these monks, and of this illness? children. We often hear of artists-to-be creating Surprisingly, the question has been rarely asked with extravagant realities in their nurseries, orchestrating the thoroughness it deserves. Many scholars have precocious displays of puppetry or painting, corral- written about Anthony, his life in late antiquity, and ling their friends into pageants, actions which we his biography by Athanasius, which is among the interpret as the necessary outpouring of the inner most famous and influential of hagiographies. Others life. There is a certain kind of person about whom have written about his association with the holy fire. we think they must pour their life force into the But no one, so far as I know, has attempted rigor- world. Anthony is not that kind of person, or does ously to explain the connection between the historical not want to be, anyway. He keeps his life force hid- Anthony and the symbolic one, except to suggest that den within him, pent up. medieval pictures showing the saint’s temptation as a Anthony’s story is about a refusal, or rather an psychedelic feast of demons might owe something to innate inability, to externalize the experience within. the hallucinations of Anthony’s fire. His continued retreat from humanity, first into a A still less explored question is what he meant hut, then a tomb, then the desert, then a far, arid to the Antonites and their ingenious system of sym- mountain, is an attempt to reach a place where his bolic caregiving. Adalbert Mischlewski, the foremost aliveness cannot escape, for there is no vessel into modern historian of the Antonites, concludes that which it can be poured, no piece of property, no it was all chance.10 Anthony was just another local article of clothing, no object, no person. He is afraid saint invoked against a scourge, and circumstances or unwilling to let his mind push beyond his body’s worked in such a way that his followers in the boundary, to make any mark on the earth. Dauphiné became the founders of an international The temptations of St. Anthony, and the holiness brotherhood. The situation is admittedly curious, he builds from them, become the blueprint for a at least on the surface. Why would a hermit be medieval hydraulics of spirit. What happens when the patron of hospitals, where the sick are packed the pressure of the inner reservoir, kept clean and together in conditions of dependence? But this is undrunk so that it might one day quench the thirst related to a larger question. How did a man living of God, builds to an unknown strength? The self alone in the desert serve as the model for European vacillates between exultation and despair, borne monasticism, one of the most intense experiments in aloft by images of other beings. Athanasius writes communal living ever attempted? that in solitude, Anthony faces a “great dustcloud For Anthony, in addition to patronizing this ill- of thoughts” sent from the devil. They include a ness, is the key hermit of the Middle Ages. Not the lascivious woman; a terrifying small black boy (this first, but the one whose influence, thanks to his biog- black boy will become a common apparition among rapher Athanasius, becomes most widespread and monks who read Athanasius too often); a dragon; accepted as a model for the holy life. His withdrawal uncounted species of twisted reptile; invisible agents into the desert in fourth-century Egypt does as who beat the hermit black and blue. The farther much as any other action to destroy the foundations Anthony retreats into himself and the more iso- of the ancient world, for he turns his back on civitas lated he becomes, the more his thoughts take on the 61 THE HOLY FIRE AND THE LONELY SAINT

Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, ca. 1500. weight of reality, and the more his existence comes But the Antonine solution, which becomes the to resemble a kingdom, crowded and oppressed, in a monastic solution, and maybe the modern solution, state of continuous insurrection. is not simply to ignore this private world, to run Anthony represents a spectacular insight of the from it back to the social one. Instead, the private Christian worldview, foreshadowed in the Gospels world must be tamed from the inside before the by the Temptation of Christ. In solitude, whether social world can be rejoined. Communal life can be geographical, spiritual, or the physical solitude of an armature for private life, providing a vocabulary sickness, a person becomes a society. And a person of actions and images through which the solitary unprepared for that solitude becomes a society in a kingdom can be brought to order. But it can’t actu- state of extreme precariousness. At one moment, his ally do the ordering, it cannot simply impose beliefs empire exceeds that of all earthly realms; it grasps at in the way that self-righteous schoolteachers will eternity in the baroque splendor of its architecture, later debase the Antonine impulse into ideology. Nor in the glitter of its jewels, in the desirability of the can it be a substitute. A person must pass through slaves in its harems, in the perfection of its awards, the rise and fall and restoration of the kingdom of punishments, and perversions. In the next, it is in a solitude in order to become, to the core, part of the state of utter catastrophe, buildings aflame and in new society of humans. ruin, the citizens and slaves deformed into factions Hieronymus Bosch’s Lisbon triptych of the savaging one another while wearing the masks of Temptation of St. Anthony, from the early sixteenth beasts. The more distant a person grows from the century, articulates this worldview very directly. In world of other people, the more complete this private the left panel, St. Anthony, who wears the tau of an universe becomes, the more real, and if unprepared, Antonite, is shown being carried by three friends the more volatile. It begins to approximate that after he has been dropped from the sky by a pack paradigmatic private universe, the dream, where of flying monsters. In the other two panels, in con- the productions of mind are the floor and sky and trast, Anthony is shown without any companions, windows and wall, not to mention every inhabitant surrounded only by a huge host of demons. If the malignant and benign. panels are meant to be viewed from left to right (as 62 MATTHEW SPELLBERG

Master of the Osservanza, Saint Anthony Tempted by the Devil in the Guise of a Woman, ca. 1435.

many of Bosch’s other triptychs very clearly are), Elaine Scarry has eloquently explained, cuts off then Anthony’s friends in the left panel are carrying its perceiver from the rest of the world. Bosch’s St. him into his isolation in the central panel, not away Anthony triptych shows the terrifying reality that from it. This point doesn’t require any great stretch can arise to fill the void, the apparitions that flood of interpretation, because they are walking him the mind which stubbornly persists to work while along a path that points directly toward the middle in isolation, whether that isolation is born from geo- of the work. It is the duty of Anthony’s helpers to graphical distance or closeness to death. In such a lead him to solitude, to prepare him for the battle situation, as the bridges fall away, the mind’s own over his private kingdom (perhaps they have offered figurations become its reality, and what might be a to take the bruised saint back to their village and he simple metaphor or symbol in some other context has said to them, no dear friends, no, carry me deeper becomes what we would call a hallucination and is, into the wilderness). One of these helpers carries a cru- to the perceiver, the very stuff of being. cifix tied to his belt. In the next panel, a crucifix, or To plant a stable and reassuring set of metaphors a tau almost transformed into a crucifix, dangles in into the overly fertile ground of mental isolation the same position from Anthony’s garment, as if the was the project of Antonite healing. The hours, the talisman has been passed from one to the other: here, shrines, the flames, the votaries, the wine, the tau, keep this, remember there are others in the world. and the white bread were an attempt to influence the The absolute ineffectiveness of medieval medi- shape of the world that each victim would inevita- cine meant, essentially, that the Antonite monks bly be forced to construct and then suffer through. could do little more than exactly what Anthony’s Bosch understood this exceptionally well, as he friends are doing. They could carry the sufferer into understood the logical conflation of Anthony and the solitude of his sickness, and leave some talisman Antonite healing. In the central panel of his triptych, of their common faith in his hand. Physical pain, the major symbolic devices of the Antonite order 63 THE HOLY FIRE AND THE LONELY SAINT appear amid the devil’s mercenaries. In the middle suffering but many forms of extreme isolation, col- ground, there is a severed foot upon a white cloth, lapse the distinction between hallucination and an ex-voto offering, still bleeding, in front of the liv- imagination. In fact, the compassion of the Antonite ing saint. Behind Anthony, partially hidden in a dark project is the direct result of its minimal impact, as room, Jesus stands at an altar right next to a crucifix Bosch depicts with sobering clarity. In his paint- and imparts a blessing; the symbol of the Savior has ing, the symbols of healing are miniscule compared become the Savior, alive and incarnate. Still more with everything that is not a symbol, or is a perver- astonishing is a burning building in the distant sion of symbols (is that the saint vinage in the hands background being looted by a pillaging army. This of a demon?), or an unformed matrix of meaning, rectangular structure with a curved chapel on the a Eucharist and a theologian and a merchant and shorter side is none other than an Antonite hospital, a fish and a devil and a monk and a chamber-pot its falling tower mounted by the tau.11 The painted all at once and never at all. The monks, following flames that decorated the walls of the Antonite hos- Anthony’s example, were resigned to the fact that pital have burst into actual fire, so that the dread dreams are hostile to the influence of waking life, of dying in fire might at least have a consistent and even though they plunder its stones to build their sympathetic continuity with the external world, as palaces. The Antonites mastered a discipline that powerless as the victim. we, thankfully, have been able to let lapse, although The Antonites practiced what might now be there is no guarantee that it won’t be needed again called palliative care for the mental confusions and soon. This discipline might be called understanding terrors of St. Anthony’s fire, wherever those terrors not-understanding, or helping when you are help- fell on the spectrum between chemical hallucination less, and it is a quixotic midwife to inner life, witness and psychic disturbance. It was perhaps their special to the birth of attitudes that make a certain notion of insight, born as much from ignorance as wisdom, selfhood possible. to understand how extreme suffering, and not just

1 In medieval Germany, the ergot regularly distributed to the poor, a a case for the ergotism hypothesis 9 The pig was the famous “cochon spur was called Hungerkorn, the gesture of unheard-of largesse. in The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire d’Antoine,” an extension of the hunger grain. 6 The recipe of the balsam was (New York: The Macmillan Com- order’s communitarian principles 2 See Mervyn J. Eadie, “Convul- a closely guarded secret, so pany, 1968). Albert Hoffman, who into the lay world. Poor farmers sive Ergotism: Epidemics of the closely guarded, in fact, that the first synthesized LSD from ergot, could promise a piglet to the order, ?” The Lancet Order itself forgot it. Adalbert disputes the ergotism explanation which would then feed on trash in Neurology, vol. 2, no. 7 (July 2003). Mischlewski reports that a 1601 in his book LSD: Mein Sorgenkind the streets until it was fat enough 3 The treatment of the holy fire letter from the head of the Antonite (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979). to be sent to the monastery to be was always related to the care of hospital in Isenheim to the Arch- 8 This argument owes a debt to slaughtered and fed to the sick. pilgrims on the roads to Santiago. duke Ferdinand of Austria says that an extraordinary observation in It was an elegant solution, for it This may be because many victims the recipe has regrettably already Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in meant that everyone and no one of ignis sacer set out for Santiago been lost. Some art historians have Pain (Oxford & New York: Oxford was responsible for the care of the in the hope of being healed; it may thought that a clue to its composi- University Press, 1985). Scarry pig, and so it diminished the bur- also simply be because pilgrims, tion might be found in the herbs writes that pain and suffering so den of the tithe. like all travelers, were vulner- depicted in Grünewald’s Isenheim completely obliterate the normal 10 Mischlewski’s major work is able and in need of special care. I Altarpiece, a spectacular late parameters of experience that they Grundzüge der Geschichte des wonder if it might also be because medieval polyptych commissioned appear to be without object: they Antoniterordens bis zum Ausgang pilgrims, many dependent on alms, by the Isenheim monks. Under the just are, almost without cause. des 15. Jahrhunderts (Cologne were often given the bread no one panel showing St. Anthony meeting And yet, there is a deep need in and Vienna: Böhlau, 1976). else wanted, and so were more fre- the hermit Paul, there are about a the suffering mind to generate an 11 This, at least, is the convinc- quently exposed to ergot. dozen herbs (by Lottelise Behling’s objective cause for that pain: if we ing conclusion of the medical 4 In Memmingen, the patients count), including delicate tendrils suffer from a terrible and mysteri- anthropologist Veit Harold Bauer themselves were called on to judge of corn poppy, sage, ribwort, ver- ous pain in the spine, we say, as if in Das Antonius-Feuer in Kunst whether or not a newly admitted bena, gentian, and ranunculus. The to dilute the mystery, It feels as if und Medizin (Berlin and Heidel- person had their disease. balsam may have had vasodilatory there is a hammer pounding on my berg; Springer Verlag, 1973). He 5 White bread, though less nutri- or disinfecting properties. spine. What begins to be compli- notes that Bosch depicts another tious than dark bread, was highly 7 The at Pont-Saint- cated, however, is when we begin Antonite hospital in a drawing of valued in the Middle Ages. When Esprit in 1951 have attracted many to say, There is a hammer pound- the Temptation of Anthony now in founding his hospital, the Hôtel- theories, including speculation that ing on my spine, and we continue the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Berlin. Dieu in Beaune, the Burgundian the CIA poured LSD into the water saying that until, before long, the chancellor Nicolas Rolin set supply as an experiment in psycho- hammer becomes enormous and aside funds for white bread to be tropic warfare. John Fuller makes alive and full of a malicious agency.